YAPC::NA 2009 Survey Results

Contents:

YAPC::NA 2009 - Survey Results

The following survey results are a simple presentation of the raw data.
No attempt has been made to analyse the data and compare with previous
years. See forthcoming PDFs for more in depth analysis.

Click on pie charts to view larger image version.

Demographics (required)

The demographic questions help us to understand who our attendees are. This is very useful for attracting sponsors, as we are able to re-enforce the idea that many of those attending are the kinds of people they would want to reach with their products or services. In some cases helps to encourage companies to participate in the job fairs.

Attendees:

Based on the number of people registered for the conference.

Count

Description

130

Responded

154

No Response

284

Total

45

Response Percentage

Age Band:

Count

Description

1

under 20

38

20 - 29

60

30 - 39

23

40 - 49

7

50 - 59

1

60 and over

Job Type:

If your position covers many roles, please base this on your most senior responsibility. Also base this on the role you perform, rather than your job title. For example, a 'QA Developer' would be a 'Developer' role, and 'Information Manager' would a Manager role (Technical or Non-Technical depending upon your responsibilites)

Count

Description

12

CEO/Company Director/Senior Manager

0

Non-Technical Manager

4

Technical Manager

14

Technical Architect/Analyst

69

Developer

11

Engineer

10

SysAdmin

0

Student

1

Lecturer/Teacher/Trainer

0

Human Resources

0

Researcher

5

Unemployed

4

Other

If 'Other' please enter your professional job role or title:

Consultant

lead engineer.

Owner

Release Engineer

Software Consultant

Sysadmin

Industry:

If you or your company undertake work within mulitple industry sectors, please select the primary one you are currently working within.

Count

Description

0

Automotive

9

Education

1

Engineering

13

Finance

9

Government

14

IT Services

46

Internet/Web

0

Legal

1

Logistics

9

Media/Entertainment

5

Medical/Healthcare

0

Property

4

Research

2

Retail

0

Telecommunications

4

Travel

4

Unemployed

7

Other

If 'Other' please enter your industry sector:

Banking

Biotechnology

Earth Science

Insurance

IT Security

non profit

nonprofit

Professional Service Automation

Region:

Please note this is the region you were a resident in, prior to attending the conference.

Count

Description

114

USA

11

Canada

0

South America

5

Europe

0

Asia

0

Australaisa

0

Africa

The Perl Community, YAPCs & Workshops

These questions are designed to help us understand our attendees level of involvement in the Perl community. Are we encouraging new people into the Perl Community, how are people getting involved with the community, can we do things better to make it easier and more exciting to be involved with the community?

How do you rate your Perl knowledge?

Count

Description

5

Beginner

54

Intermediate

70

Advanced

How many previous YAPCs have you attended?

Count

Description

44

This was my first YAPC

283

YAPC::NA

41

YAPC::Europe

5

YAPC::Asia

1

YAPC::Australia / OSDC::Australia

1

YAPC::Israel / OSDC::Israel

0

YAPC::Russia

0

YAPC::SA / YAPC::Brazil

How many Perl Workshops have you attended?

Count

Description

78

Never attended one

54

Pittsburgh Perl Workshop

11

Frozen Perl Workshop

34

any European Perl Workshops

0

any Russian Perl Workshops

13

Other Perl Workshops

Do you plan to attend a future YAPC/Workshop?

Count

Description

112

Yes

15

Maybe

2

Don't Know

1

No

If no, could you tell us why?

Particularly if this is your first YAPC, we would like to understand why you would not be able or interested in attending another event like it.

I learn better on my own

I think the allocation of time to certain classes was not nearly enough, and others were given too much. I think advanced classes should be given the 50 minute slots. Also, just a suggestion to the teachers, if it's at all within YAPC's control, too much time was taken up in several classes with instructors talking about why Perl is not dead and why we should use it; this to me seemed like it was implicit to the people at YAPC, and so we should have spent more time on the actual material rather than taking 10 minutes of the 20 minute sessions talking about why we should use Perl. Otherwise, it was a well done conference.

Location and timing are the only reasons I might not go.

The level of talks appeared unattractive to me. While my primary interest was Parrot, I do have a Perl background. But many of the talks seemed either irrelevant or trivial. (USB rocket launcher? Git is easy?)

Are you a member of a local Perl Mongers user group?

Count

Description

88

Yes

42

No

If not, do you plan to find one or start one?

Count

Description

6

Yes

19

Maybe

4

Don't Know

19

No

What other areas of the Perl Community do you contribute to?

Count

Description

70

I'm a CPAN Author

13

I'm a CPAN Tester

35

I'm a Perl project developer (eg Rakudo, Catalyst, TAP, Padre, etc)

52

I have a technical blog (e.g. a use.perl journal or personal blog)

41

I use or contribute to PerlMonks or other Perl forums

71

I use IRC (e.g. #perl, #yapc, or #london.pm)

38

I contribute to Perl mailing lists (e.g. P5P, Perl QA, etc)

12

other ...

If 'Other' please enter your area of contribution

blog at work (not public)

contribute patches

former (and hopeful to be again) Perl instructor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

I hack on Parrot

I organize our local Perl Mongers group

i will do better in this reqard

In house rabble rousing

MojoMojo, Catalyst contributor

organizing workshops

Perl Foundation

Secretary/Director of the Enlightened Perl Organisation

TPF volunteer and provide patches to perl modules

YAPC::NA 2009

Regarding YAPC::NA 2009 in Pittsburgh specifically, please answer the following as best you can.

These questions are used to try and identify areas of the conference that did and didn't work, with the aim of giving future organisers an opportunity to improve on all aspects of the conferences experience.

When did you decide to come to this conference?

Count

Description

62

I'm now a regular YAPC::NA attendee

13

After YAPC::NA 2008 in Chicago

0

After joining the Facebook event group

14

After seeing promotions online/in the press

23

I was nominated to attend by manager/colleague

23

I was recommended to attend by friend/colleague

18

other ...

If 'Other' please let us know when

after attending all the PPW events

After figuring holiday dates at work

After seeing PVMW announcement

After YAPC::NA 2006 in Chicago -- first chance to attend YAPC::NA since then

alternative to OSCON

based on proximity

Discovered YAPC website online

Interested and company let us go

it was local

mentioned on the BioPerl mailing list

Once they accepted some talks.

regular YAPC attendee

to join the Parrot workshop

via local PM group

When I saw it was close and was able to get time off to go

When my manager approved the expense

when my talks(s) were accepted :)

When our funding was cut and I couldn't go to OSCON.

Were you a speaker?

Count

Description

74

No

19

No, but I have spoken before at similar conferences

27

Yes, and I have spoken before at similar conferences

10

Yes, and it was my first time as a speaker

Note that "similar conferences" includes other YAPCs, as well as Linux, Open Source or large technical events such as workshops.

If you weren't a speaker, would you consider speaking at a future conference?

Count

Description

66

Yes

10

No

18

Ask me later

What was your motivation for coming?

Count

Description

60

the list of speakers

68

the quality of the talks scheduled

28

to be a speaker

95

to meet with Perl/project co-contributors

100

to socialise with Perl geeks

24

to meet Larry Wall

33

to visit Pittsburgh/America

15

other ...

If 'Other' please let us know your motivation for coming

cheap and close

I always come.

I was local, it was inexpensive and convenient to see the talks whether they were high quality or not

networking / job finding

Parrot workshop/hackathon

PVMW and face time with other Parrot hackers

recruiting at job fair

see people I had seen at earlier YAPCs

SQL class

The topics of the talks scheduled

To bring new employees

To learn ways improve perl usage at my company

To learn what I didn't know I didn't know

to take courses

work shop before, classes after

What aspects of the conference do you feel gave value for money?

Count

Description

117

the talks / speakers

3

the conference bag

43

the tshirt

8

the job fair

49

the conference dinner

54

the conference venue

37

the city of Pittsburgh

56

the hallway track

95

the attendees

5

other ...

If 'Other' please enter your suggestions

BoFs

Moose course

Pittsburgh weather

PVMW

speaker's party # it's the people I want to talk to, distilled into one place

work shop before, classes after

Did you have holiday planned around your conference attendance?

Count

Description

88

I came just for the conference

2

several days before only

10

1 day before only

12

several days before and after

4

1 day after only

11

several days after only

Were there any talks you want to see, but missed due to clashes in the schedule?

Count

Description

74

Yes

48

No

If 'Yes', which talks did you miss?

There are always conflicts in the schedule, as it's difficult to know what everyone would like to see. However, if you could list a few talks that you missed, it would give speakers an idea whether it would be worth updating their talks for furture events.

Count

Description

9

chromatic - Take Advantage of Modern Perl

9

Shawn Moore - Extending Moose for Applications

8

Stevan Little - KiokuDB - A Real World Introduction

8

Yuval Kogman - What Haskell did to my brain

7

Hans Dieter Pearcey - CPAN - A big enough lever to install the world

6

Ingy döt Net - All New YAML Tools for Perl

6

Jesse Vincent - Distributed bug tracking with SD

6

Michael Schwern - Trapped In A Room With Schwern

5

Jonathan Swartz - CHI: Unified caching for Perl

5

Josh ben Jore - Effective Debugging

5

Nathan Gray - Getting the most out of TAP

5

Patrick Michaud - Perl 6 today

5

Perrin Harkins - Choosing a Web Architecture for Perl

5

Ricardo Signes - Git is Easy

5

Ricardo Signes - Validating Data Everywhere with Rx

5

Robin Darby - perl, cloud glue?

4

Devin Austin - Intro To Moose

4

Hans Dieter Pearcey - Dist::Zilla - Automating quality since 2008

4

Jonathan Rockway - Using KiokuDB

4

Mark Keating - What is Enlightened Perl? What is the Enlightened Perl Organisation?

4

Matt S Trout - Catching a ::Std - Standardisation and best practices in the perl community

Timothy Appnel - Movable Type Open Source : The Perl Publishing System The Community Forgot

1

Walt Mankowski - SQLite Functions, Aggregators and Collators

Additional comments:

A lot, too many to remember or list. But that's just how it goes. I dealt with this by (rudely) dipping in, moving from talk to talk.

Any Talk between 8 am and 9 am

I'd like to add: it would be really helpful if all speakers were forced to make the following decision before giving their talk: either A) give a link to their slides, which can remain hidden until after the talk is given, B) directly indicate that they genuinely have no intention of posting the slides for whatever unspecified reason, C) to provide a firm date by which time they will have posted the slides, and if the slides are not up by then, those who missed the talk can feel free to inquire further. I am proposing this be up BEFORE the talks. I feel like a jerk to ask speakers for slides when I know a lot of them are finalized the night before, which I don't hold against them, and I can understand the desire to clean such slides up before posting them. Thus I don't want to send irritating emails to speakers whose talks I missed, asking when the slides will be up. However, as YAPC fades into the past, I suspect the urge to do any cleanup completely fades, and it becomes likely that slides will never be posted. If a firm post-YAPC date was set (by the YAPC committee for everyone, or else by each speaker individually) for the slides to be up, it should really improve this situation.

all of the Perl6 track

I missed too many talks to enumerate because of the Hallway track being too damn interesting.

I was sick the whole time and missed practically everything

I wish there were three of me. I'd have been in all of them

If I hadn't been speaking I would have been able to see the talks I wanted.

morning talks were too early,

the morning talks Tuesday and Wednesday

There were a few timeslots where I had to choose the better of two good talks, but some where I had to choose the lesser of two evil talks. The worst were time slots when there were only 2-3 choices.

There were several talks on each day that I wanted to attend, but occurred at the same time.

There were two that I wanted to see, but I don't recall... don't have the schedule in front of me...

Moose

Perl 6 talks, in general

Talks about Pugs

Were there any speakers not present, who you would like to have seen at the conference?

Additional comments:

I think there was an NYTProf talk scheduled but cancelled, which I would like to have seen.

It seemed like this conference was a little less full than some previous years. I suppose this may be due to the recession.

It's impossible to know the vast array of speakers that were not able to present

Given Andy Lester's new book, it would've been nice if he was on hand to give a talk about its subject matter.

The speaker who was going to give the "GIt: The Lean Mean Distributed Machine" talk, who had to cancel at the last minute.

Hope that Andy Lester will attend sometime and give the talk he's given at OSCON: Just Enough C for Open Source Projects.

What kinds of talks would you prefer at future conferences?

Count

Description

4

More beginner level talks

20

More intermediate level talks

35

More advanced level talks

60

It's about right

10

No preference

Are there any topics you would specifically like to see featured?

"What's my workflow" This would be a presentation about the tools and processes you use when writing and editing perl.
"Lunch for Six" sign up sheets getting 6 or so people together to have lunch. Attempt to get first timers stirred into the community with those that have more experience in a social setting.
"The Great Debate" public airing of organizational laundry. There have been a few pointed "jokes" by speakers. Lets get them out in the open.

* Modern Perl style - most common Perl books still don't have new editions, and use old style Perl
* More talks on debugging
* Talk/s examining the architecture of large, distributed Perl applications

- Meta-discussion of the Perl community itself
- How to Evangelize Perl

A tour of the perl guts.

CGI-application was not covered

Comet, Spread, XMPP PubSub, building JSON APIs, OpenID

Cool stuff to do... more demonstrations, such as "Build a desktop application with Perl, HTTP::Engine, SQLite and jQuery" (that one needed 50 minutes, not just 20); ditto re "Drop-In Web-Based REPL for CGI Applications." Awesome.

DBIx::Class (usage) on its own didnt feature, we should have it at every conf if theres a significant amount of new attendees.
The question above I would like to be re-phrased not as beginner/intermediate/advanced, but standard/core modules (everyone should know for certain subjects) versus specialised modules.
I would also prefer a tutorial/actual code usage/teaching track again.

How to begin getting involved with the Perl community and development.

How to force-multiply by teaching co-workers.

I enjoyed the sessions on optimizing memory usage in Perl code. I'd like to see more in the way of algorithms, performance optimization, and using various "higher-order" techniques to develop high performance software.

I like new software to be spotlighted. Stevan Little does a great job with this. Are other people creating new great things?
I also enjoy having a status update on software that is being developed, such as Perl 6, Catalyst, DBIC.
When we starting having extended core recommendations, it would be nice to have talks on those, to help people know what is out there that they should be using. Likewise, it is confusing when one talk features some module, and another speaker later says that module should not be used. We should not ban talks about modules competing with extended core modules, but perhaps note that the talk is about a controversal or new module.

It seemed like a number of first-timers were there this year. I might be a good idea to layout the ideas and philosophies of open source in general to them. A review of The Cathedral and the Bazaar for example. Whatever we do it needs to help move people from being interested in perl (and OS) to actually working on it.

KiokuDB, Catalyst, Moose

More Code, Less Eye Candy: Meaning any talk should be a bit more technical by specifically showing some examples of code and walking through those bits of code. Many talks seemed to be just this *thing* is cool - use it. But, with little to express, *how* to use it.

More in depth on Web technologies like Catalyst-PostgreSQL-jQuery toolsets.

more mod_perl content.

More on moving from a beginner Perl person to an intermediate one. I'm thinking more of learning habits of successful Perl users (not necessarily "luminaries"), than learning how to push the bleeding edge. Some amount of that dazzle is cool, but improving the lives of beginner-intermediate developers could be worth a lot.
The kind of speaker I am thinking of would need more encouragement to submit a talk and see the value in presenting it than a driven "luminary" would need.
The best ones (luminaries) do a good job of straddling their deep knowledge and where the common user is. They give talks that are really useful to intermediate attendees -- not all famous Perl folk are more sizzle than steak.
More "here is what works well for me and has been proven in practice" talks are preferred (by me) than "here is the cleverest thing I could come up with" talks.

more Parrot

more perl for systems administration instead of perl for application development

More POE (not vaporware).

More talks describing actual experiences solving specific real-world problems, instead of just theory/modules. "Use Modern Perl!" or "Use the Flavor of the Day!" is wonderful, but it is not helpful only in theory. What techniques and practices can be used, or have been used, to convert existing legacy/mature code bases to newer technologies?

Porting Perl5 apps to Perl6 -- hopefully with specific examples.
Managing Parrot -- is there anything tweakable about it that *can* be adjusted?
Bioinformatics (state of BioPerl, handling specific tasks)

Rose

Since we all know each other by IRC/PAUSE, it would be nice to print our nicknames prominently on the badges.

Some more talks about "I did this interesting thing with Perl" or "I bet you didn't know you could do _that_ with Perl". E.g. Michael Schilli's talk on using Perl to control a USB rocket launcher. Along the same lines, case studies, i.e. "I converted my company's web site to Catalyst, and here's how I did it."

Somewhat related to the above, I think the beginner/intermediate/advanced designations can be more confusing than they're worth. The target audience for the OOP talk on Wednesday was listed as 'any' but it wasn't very useful for anyone but complete beginners.
Being a web developer, I would, of course, like to see more web app (specifically Catalyst)-related talks, but otherwise I think there's a great balance.
Also, more mst! :-)

Things against the grain: projects other than Moose/Catalyst. Less EPO. More talks about community (like Karen Pauley's talk), less about individuals (personality cults). Higher bar for technical talks.

Various topics on increasing participation in the Perl community, such as "Becoming a CPAN Author", "Make That A Module", "Starting (or Reviving) a PerlMonger Group", "Getting Your Company To Share Their DarkPAN Wealth", etc.

The Conference Fee

In order to help future organisers gauge an appropriate conference fee, how much would you (or your company) have paid for a conference ticket? Feel free to provide an answer for all rates, where corporate rate would be paid for by your company (including a Master Class place), standard rate would be the regular price paid by attendees in paid employment, and lastly the concession rate for anyone who holds proof that they are in fulltime education or are unemployed.

Corporate Rate:

Count

Fee

1

$ 99

2

$ 100

1

$ 125

2

$ 150

5

$ 200

7

$ 250

1

$ 295

3

$ 300

2

$ 350

3

$ 400

1

$ 499

11

$ 500

1

$ 750

3

$ 1000

1

$ 1200

1

$ 1500

2

$ 2000

Standard Rate:

Count

Fee

1

$ 75

1

$ 99

24

$ 100

1

$ 120

8

$ 125

10

$ 150

1

$ 150-200

1

$ 199

16

$ 200

1

$ 219

3

$ 250

1

$ 400

Concession Rate:

Count

Fee

1

$ scholarship

1

$ 20

4

$ 25

1

$ 40

14

$ 50

2

$ 60

12

$ 75

1

$ 80

2

$ 99

4

$ 100

1

$ 125

1

$ 150

How did you pay for the conference fee?

Count

Description

19

N/A - I was a speaker

0

N/A - I was a sponsor

57

My company paid

50

I paid out of my own pocket

0

I wasn't able to attend

Except where explicitly stated within the individual documents, all survey data and documents are considered copyright of The Perl Foundation and may be used under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.